Curious Geek. Husband. Father. Educator.

What got left out of the iPod Touch

The iPod Touch got announced. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone bits. It can do all of the media stuff. It has WiFi and Safari and YouTube. But it’s interesting to me the applications that it DOESN’T have, that it easily could:

No Email

No Google Maps (this would have been killer)

No Calendar

No Weather

No Stocks

No Notes

No Clock app

But for some reason it does include an Address Book, and a Calculator. Those seem like unusual choices for what is essentially a media-rich web tablet.

Which leads to the question “how easy is it going to be for homebrew hackers to copy those apps to the iPod Touch?” My guess is “pretty easy”. From what I’ve seen of the internals of the iPhone OS, it seems to follow pretty standard Mac OS X/UNIX file structures and app packages. No doubt it will be trivial for hackers to copy the missing apps over for people who want them, and aren’t afraid.

But still, for something that basically just redefined the “web tablet” market, it’s interesting to analyze the choices that were made.